After two of the four debates of the 2012 presidential season, what is most striking is how much of the response, as expressed in mainstream news coverage and social media, focuses on body language, demeanor, matters of etiquette, and whether a candidate was likable.

In the analysis after the vice-presidential debate last week, commentators on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, as well as legions of Twitter and Facebook users, took particular note of Vice President Biden’s behavior throughout the debate, with the words “smirking” and “rude” arising frequently.

“Smirking Joe Biden, uber-earnest Paul Ryan play to TV draw,” in the Baltimore Sun. The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney, writing on the Times’ , wondered, “[S]ubstance aside, will Mr. Biden be scored for his style? Will his laughing, eye-rolling and interrupting be seen as too pushy, too aggressive, too disrespectful?”

In Politico’s , “Pundits parse Joe Biden’s big grin,” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s chief strategist in 2008, said. “[Biden’s] smiling, the laughing, the grinning, if you look at the recent history of debates – whether it was Al Gore sighing, President George Herbert Walker Bush looking at his watch – so many of these debates have come to be dominated by these personality quirks that manifest … themselves over the course of the debate as opposed to the substance of the answers in the debate.”

Indeed, Biden’s aggressiveness seemed to some commentators to have been designed to compensate for President Obama’s nearly opposite style in his first debate with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney Oct. 3.

Andrew Sullivan, blogger for The Daily Beast and a strong Obama supporter, after the first debate, “Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t��there. He was entirely defensive.”

Obama in a radio interview with Tom Joyner as having been “just too polite” in his encounter with Romney.

Daily Beast media columnist Howard Kurtz Romney’s and Obama’s performances in that debate: “What viewers at home saw was a poised and confident challenger and a long-winded incumbent giving discursive answers and never using his strongest ammunition. Presidential debates are political theater, and��Obama did not play the role of a leading man.”

It was, in fact, a case of role-reversal. Heading into the Oct. 3 debate, a big issue for Romney was whether he was likable enough for voters.

As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus , describing a poll, “on the … measure of which candidate seems more friendly and likable,��President Obama trounced Romney 61 percent to 27 percent among registered voters, with margins slightly larger in tossup states and among independents. Even 33 percent of��Republicans��found Obama more likable.”

Some of Romney’s conservative supporters asserted that likability didn’t matter, so Romney should not seek to boost his poll ratings in that area. Since the debate, however, Romney’s likability rise to new levels. Curiously, so did Obama’s.

The question of Rep. Ryan’s likability has not captivated political pundits to the same degree as it has about his running mate. However, John O’Sullivan, a contributor to the conservative National Review, that, despite Biden’s “rudeness” during the vice-presidential debate, he won “on points.” Biden “appeared to be authoritative and Ryan slightly confusing,” owing to his rapid, nervous speaking style, which O’Sullivan described as “a forgettable stream of wonkery.”

The NBC of the debate lampooned Biden for his seemingly random outbursts of laughter and discourtesy toward Ryan, and Ryan for his consumption of large amounts of water. At one point, the actress playing moderator Martha Raddatz claimed, “America’s small children would like [Ryan] to stop looking into the lens” because “they find it upsetting.”

The focus on Obama’s passivity, Romney’s unlikability, Ryan’s nervousness or Biden’s condescension raises a question: Should the head of one branch of the U.S. government, in charge of the most powerful military in history and responsible for the safety of more than 300 million people, be selected on the basis of whether he or she is polite or rude, aggressive or passive, smirking, smiling or unable to make eye contact?

If a leader had the formula to ensure peace and prosperity, do voters care whether he or she has a pleasing personality or conducts himself or herself according to Emily Post’s etiquette?

Veteran political journalist John Dickerson, political director for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate, that ran just before the first debate about presidential qualifications, posing the question, “suppose the current presidential campaign were an extended job interview?” What qualities does a president actually need to do the job effectively?

Dickerson named four: political skill, management ability, persuasiveness and temperament.�� Leadership is actually just the sum of those skills, according to Dickerson, who did not mention qualities like intelligence, knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, or a well-honed political philosophy. The job, in his view, mostly requires personal skills and innate abilities. That is because a U.S. president does not act autonomously. He or she works through other people who must agree to follow his or her direction.

Thus, the importance of the vice-presidential debate – neither candidate won decisively – will probably derive not from what the candidates said, but from whether their behavior onstage conveyed to voters that they have the personal qualities to take on the massive, multi-faceted managerial challenges of the presidency.

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Social media has been a wild card in presidential politics since at least 2003, when liberal, tech-savvy activists used blogs and early social networks to lift from obscurity Gov. Howard Dean’s anti-war challenge to front-runner Sen. John Kerry.

But so far, social media has played a minimal role in the most decisive campaign news events – the presidential and vice presidential debates held in the final weeks of the campaign. The debate tradition, according to co-founder Micah Sifry, is the political institution that “has changed the least since the rise of the Internet, despite public demands for greater participation and transparency.”

That is because the presidential campaigns don’t want change, Sifry contends. Sifry, who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, is editor of , a blog about how politicians use the Web. He was a long-time advocate for campaign finance reform. The Personal Democracy Forum runs a website and an annual conference on how technology trends are affecting politics and government.

, Sifry said that the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) “is deeply committed to making sure that the people who used to be known as ‘the audience’ remain only that. There will be no citizen participation of any meaningful kind in these encounters.”

The campaigns of President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney “stage manage the entire show with a secret contract negotiated in advance by their top lawyers that lays out in incredible detail what will and won’t happen at the debates.”

Such agreements have long been a point of contention among government and political reform organizations. Recently, 18 such groups, including Common Cause, Public Citizen, Judicial Watch and Rock the Vote, that the campaigns release the details of their contract.

Despite the existence of that agreement, the CPD co-chairs, former Clinton White House Press Secretary Michael McCurry and former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr., “an innovative Internet-based voter education program that will encourage citizens to become familiar with the issues to be discussed in the debates, and to share their input with the debate moderators in advance of the debates.”

But, as Sifry wrote, only one of the four debate moderators – ABC News’ Martha Raddatz – has asked her Twitter followers for suggested questions. Jim Lehrer of , who will moderate the first debate today, does not have his own Twitter presence.

frequently for questions for upcoming guests, but has not asked on behalf of Lehrer for debate question ideas as of Oct. 2.�� However, that hasn’t stopped activists from making “Tell Jim Lehrer…” a popular word string on Facebook, and , Sifry says.

On Sept. 25, the CPD a digital initiative, “The Voice Of…” In partnership with Google, Yahoo! and AOL, the CPD will “provide the American public with access to information about the issues at large, feature the live debates, allow access to archival debate footage, and give people throughout the country the opportunity to share their voice.”

The ��is essentially contained in a series of three-question polls about key issues, such as national security, foreign policy and energy and the environment. At this time, the sites do not promise that anyone involved with the debates, neither candidates nor moderators, will be asked to respond to the results. And it would be hard to envision “The Voice Of…” initiative taking the place of the robust and sometimes shrill debates that occur constantly on Twitter and Facebook.

Coverage from Federal News Service

Like many news organizations and bloggers, The Dolan Company’s , will be live-blogging the four debates this month, but with a twist.

FedNews has a large archive, stretching back to 1984, of transcripts of presidential and candidate speeches, past debates, public hearings and other public events focused on the federal government and federal elections. ” the verbatim transcript of the debate for its subscribers. A full, time-stamped version will be available in FNS’s online store, which is particularly useful to news organizations and political junkies that wish to post video clips of the debate.

, which is being launched in conjunction with the debates, correspondents for FedNews will post past comments on debate topics by Obama and Romney so readers can see for themselves how much the candidates have altered their stances since the 2008 campaign and on other public occasions. The conversation will continue on and . ��

Meanwhile, Tumblr, a blog platform with 69 million blogs that is popular among college-age users, will be which means the editors of will post short, endlessly repeating videos documenting “the best debate moments, from zingers to gaffes to awkward silences,” and are inviting users to do the same during the debates.

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, a bitmap image format that goes back to 1987. Its use in making short animations, sometimes using video footage, has become a popular format for humorous graphics, something in which Tumblr .

As Sifry says, neither the candidates nor the moderator will be following the flurry of online responses to their words, but the election will be influenced by it.

And as Mississippi State University political science professor Marty Wiseman on Science Daily, “With the new, absolute explosion of social media, you can have the smallest little parenthetical expression that occurs in a debate, and you are going to see it parsed so many times in social media, there will be consequences.”

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